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A former health minister has broken a long tradition of silence and censorship
to admit that air pollution in China is killing as many as half a million
people each year.

The comments by Chen Zhu, which appeared in the Lancet medical journal,
come as the Administration of Xi Jinping confronts the same grim trade-off
as its predecessors between soaring economic growth and the nation’s health.

In the decade leading up to 2011, lung cancer rates in the Chinese capital
nearly doubled, and at a national level lung cancer deaths have more than
quadrupled as the mostly coal-powered frenzy of